Apparently there was trouble at the International Conference on
Global Warming, but for once it was not about Global Warming
itself. It seems for evening recreation they showed the film
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. The film had to be interrupted when an
argument broke out in the audience as to whether the temple that
turns into a death trap did so because Indiana Jones stole the
idol. There was a contingent who claimed that we did not see
enough to know if the temple was really different before and after
Indy took the idol. Perhaps it was a trick of the camera. And
even if it was different, it is not clear that the activating of
the death traps was actually caused in any way by Indy's action.
There was a delay of at least two seconds before any apparent
activation took place. There is, they say, obviously a
politically correct contingent who would like to blame Indiana
Jones's problems in the deathtraps of the temple on Jones himself,
but there is no proof in the film that this is the case or that he
needs to change his behavior. [-mrl]

It should be noted that May 3 of this year is the 50th
anniversary of a major milestone in the horror film. That was
the date of the rebirth of what was mistakenly thought to be
moribund, the gothic horror film. Universal Studios had built a
gothic horror cycle in large part out of the ruins of the German
film industry and the tradition of the popular films of Lon
Chaney. They had made a cycle of horror films starting with
DRACULA in 1930 and FRANKENSTEIN the following year. This they
developed into a whole series of horror films whose whole was
worth a lot more than the sum of its parts. The first Universal
Dracula and Frankenstein films were hobbled by the filmmakers not
yet having mastered sound film. Each series peaked with its
second film (DRACULA'S DAUGHTER and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN) and
went rapidly down with each successive film. They finished the
series off--the two then merged together--with three monster
rallies that brought together as many of their classic monsters
as they could fit on the screen. The first of these was HOUSE OF
FRANKENSTEIN, then HOUSE OF DRACULA, and finally they really put
a bullet into the series with ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET
FRANKENSTEIN. After that in the 1940s and early 1950s the most
they did with their horror cycle was have Abbott and Costello
meet their old monsters in films with hack scripts that sold on
the titles and probably not word of mouth. Gothic horror was
dead. In the first half of the 1950s Universal almost abandoned
traditional horror altogether for science fiction.

Meanwhile in a Britain only slowly getting back on its feet after
the war, Hammer Films was in the dubious market of making low-
budget films, frequently taking popular television and radio
plays, and reworking them for the screen. They did comedies and
dramas. Mostly these were films that were forgettable and were
churned out because by law half the films released in Britain had
to be British films and if the exhibitors wanted to show American
films they had to show an equal number of British films. These
were the "quota quickies." Actually, there were some very good
films made by studios like Ealing at this time since there was
little pressure on them to make the films profitable. The
American film each allowed into Britain was where the real profit
was expected.

Like Universal was now doing in America, Hammer dabbled in
science fiction. They made THE FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE, SPACEWAYS,
THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, QUATERMASS II, and X THE UNKNOWN. They
found that the macabre and fantasy often were their most
successful films. Then they had the idea. Nobody had yet made a
gothic horror film in color. (There was one color sequence in
THE RETURN OF DRACULA. Universal had made three horror films set
at the Paris Opera house and each used color in all or part.)
Universal had very much driven gothic horror into the ground.

Nobody really knew if color might not ruin the mood of a horror
film. Hammer experimented to see what would happen if they made a
Frankenstein film in color. They could make it sensational by
showing flashes of body parts and blood and they would show up
well because it was color.

Originally the film was to be similar to the Universal film of
1931, but Universal threatened to sue if it was at all
reminiscent of their film. Well, so much for the script they had
written and for having Boris Karloff play Dr. Frankenstein. The
film was cast with stock players. Peter Cushing played Victor
Frankenstein. They needed somebody imposing for the monster and
Christopher Lee was chosen because he was 6'5" tall. The title
was THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. May 3, 1957, was the release
date.

The critics for the most part thought that the imagery was too
visceral. They did not think that visual horror would or should
have much of a future. In fact, almost everything is implied
even in this film. We also see some red stains on clothing, and
some organs hidden mostly by cloth or fluid. Much of what would
be disgusting is kept just offscreen. Most of the rest is red
smeared on clothing. It is more the color that creates the
effect than actually being graphic.

Word of mouth spread more quickly than critical reviews. For
better or worse suddenly the film was a giant hit. This was a
new experience for Hammer films. They were used to making films
for filling out the bottom halves of double bills. Now theaters
had queues around the blocks of people wanting to see their film.
Warner Brothers executives had a New York screening and within
two hours had sent a print to Jack Warner himself, effectively
saying, "Look what we found! Nail this one down quickly." Jack
Warner himself screened the film and immediately bought it.
Warners released it with saturation booking and in many cities
around-the-clock showings.

Eventually the film brought back its production costs something
between twenty and seventy times (depending on who is telling the
story). While not all the effects of this film were positive,
this was really the advent of explicit rather than implied horror
in cinema.

Horror, science fiction, and fantasy had been a very small part
of British film output to this point. Suddenly it became a major
factor. Hammer's next gothic film was DRACULA (United States
title: HORROR OF DRACULA), an even bigger success. This was a
real jumpstart for the British film industry. In America, for
once Alfred Hitchcock found himself following somebody else's
lead. There is far more graphic in Hitchcock's PSYCHO than in
any of his previous films. What probably set this film apart was
the use of color and British filmmaking craftsmanship.

Terence Fisher, who had directed, did not have much of a budget
at all, but the British accents and sets gave the film a feeling
that it was a quality product. There was demand for more British
horror. For fifteen years at least, British horror had a certain
cachet. Many of the horror film fans of the boomer generation
saw the Universal horror films on television Saturday late night,
but they saw British horror films and particularly Hammer films
on the wide screen and later on prime time movies of the week.
The actual quality of CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN may not stand up to
objective scrutiny, but its influence on the horror film is
inestimable and continues today in virtually every science
fiction and horror film. Like STAR WARS, it would be easy to
blame CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN for the excesses of its imitators.
But there are many find horror films that would never have been
made without its lead. It spawned an entire cycle of British
horror films and can be considered the first modern horror film.

Thursday, May 3, will be the 50th anniversary of the release of
CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. [-mrl]

[I realize that my Borgesian column usually runs in August or
September, but it is early this year.]

As I was looking for a book at the library, I came across A NEW
UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY by Rhys Hughes (ISBN-10
1-892389-83-5, ISBN-13 978-1-892-38983-1) in the science fiction
section. I have two possible explanations for what it was doing
in the science fiction section, neither of them very convincing.
One is that it is an homage to a work by Jorge Luis Borges (A
UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY by Jorge Luis Borges (ISBN-10
0-525-47546-X, ISBN-13 978-0-525-47546-0)), and everyone knows
that what Borges writes is science fiction, or fantasy, or
something like that. The problem with this theory is that Borges
is not shelved in the science fiction section. The second theory
is that it is alternate history, because while Hughes is writing
about real people, his accounts do not match up with the people's
real histories. The problem with this is the same--Borges's book
did the same, and it is not treated as alternate history.
(Actually, I have a third theory: anything published by Ministry
of Whimsy Press is considered fantasy.)

Before I talk about the Hughes book, let me discuss the Borges.
Borges gives the "histories" of such infamous people as Billy the
Kid and Monk Eastman, but while a lot of the what he writes is
true, there is enough that is false to cause real problems to
anyone who trusts the accounts enough to try to pass an
examination on the subjects. For example, Billy the Kid's mother
was Irish, but he was not "brought up among Negros." He was shot
by Pat Garrett, but not in Sumner and not in the manner Borges
describes.

(Allen B. Ruch has pointed out that "Monk Eastman, Purveyor of
Iniquities" has come to have a very Borgesian history: Borges
wrote it using Herbert Asbury's GANGS OF NEW YORK (1928) as a
source, and the recent movie tie-in edition of Asbury's book uses
parts of Borges's article as an introduction!)

There are also several small pieces in a section titled "Et
cetera" which Borges credits to other sources, such as Sir
Richard Burton's translation of A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS or
Burton's LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA. Of course, these
references are completely bogus, which is probably why Borges
chose very long works that would be difficult to read through to
verify them.

One sees the same recurring themes in A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF
INFAMY that I commented on in my review of LABYRINTHS. The most
common recurring reference in Borges's work is to mirrors. They
are mentioned in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and eight other
stories in LABYRINTHS. In A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY, they
are mentioned in "The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv" (1934): "The
world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and
fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are
abominations." [tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni] This is almost
precisely the quote from the article on Uqbar cited in "Tlon,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940): "For one of those gnostics, the
visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism.
Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and
extend it." [tr. Andrew Kerrigan]

And switching now to Rhys Hughes:

This echoing of other works shows up in A NEW UNIVERSAL HISTORY
OF INFAMY. Compare these two passages:

Borges: "I should define as baroque that style which deliberately
exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all possibilities and which
borders on its own parody. ... The very title of these pages
flaunts their baroque character. To curb them would amount to
destroying them.... ["Preface to the 1954 Edition"]

Hughes: "I might describe as Borgesian that excessive interest in
possibilities which never (or rarely) succeeds in exhausting
itself with awe, terror, or time. ... The very title of this
little book flaunts its Borgesian character. To apologize for it
wiuld be tantamount to admitting I am incapable of paying the
great man tribute." ["Preface to the Unpublished Edition"]

(In this and in other echoes, Hughes seems to favor the di
Giovanni translation over the later Hurley one as published in
Borges's COLLECTED FICTIONS.)

This echoing, in fact, is Borgesian on a meta-level; Hughes seems
to be following, at least in part, the lead of Pierre Menard. He
is "Rhys Hughes, Author of a Universal History of Infamy."

Hughes borrows some Borgesian themes. In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius", Borges describes the various stages of "hronir"
("copies" of a sort) has the notion that copies get less and less
accurate. Hughes also references Borges. In "Trader of Doom,
Basil Zaharoff", Hughes talks about Zaharoff wrote "Realms of the
Lost", in which Zaharoff says that lost objects have slipped into
another dimension, which is necessarily populated with fewer
objects than ours. When objects in *that* dimension are lost,
they slip into yet another dimension, with yet fewer objects, and
so on. The tenth dimension "contains nothing but a bare
landscape, a road, a tree and two men with the appearance of
tramps." (This is, of course, yet another literary reference.)

Hughes also references Borges. In "Basil Zaharoff", Hughes
refers in passing to how "the Widow Ching could afford to buy her
way into expertly researched histories of infamy as a 'lady
pirate' despite her mild manners and timid nature." "The Widow
Ching, Lady Pirate" is one of the stories in the Borges volume.
He also mentions Herbert Quain (Borges's "An Examination of the
Work of Herbert Quain"). And in "The Maddest King, Henri
Christophe", Hughes changes the date of the actual Haitian slave
revolt by two days (August 22, 1791) so that he can have it occur
on August 24--Borges's birthday.

Hughes has some non-Borgesian inside jokes as well. In the same
story, he mentions the Vicar of Splott, Lionel Fanthorpe. Lionel
Fanthorpe was a prolific science fiction writer of the pulp era.

Hughes does falter in his pastiche with such stories as "The
Worst Hero, Dick Turpin" and "The Maddest King, Henri
Christophe", which are full of such absurdities that one cannot
even begin to believe them. But the ability to be believable is
a key component of why the rest--and all of Borges's stories--
work so well.

It may be reading too much into this to say that both Borges and
Hughes were writing in countries whose literary culture has been
dominated by that of a conquering foreign country: for Borges
Argentina and Spain, for Hughes, Wales and England. In both
cases, the home country had no written literary tradition before
their conquest, and created their literature in the foreign
tongue. (This is not quite as true for Wales, I realize--one
cannot stretch the analogy too much.) [-ecl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown
is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
(The Conquest of Happiness)
-- Bertrand Russell